After looking at the latest blog of David Weinberger’s who has talked about 2 types of control, I like the type of 'report abuse' which can protect privacy . However, I think the edge cases or 'grey area' will still remain controversial over period of time.
One thing I still don't understand why we cannot search more detailed information, for example to located the exact address of a building in Guangzhou, Mainland China, on google maps..
Sunday 30 March 2008
Wednesday 12 March 2008
What is miscellaneous?
What is miscellaneious? I have watched a video about David Weinbergers' speech. In this video , it's talking about "Everything is miscellaneous". What is that about?
When you have access to such a huge information resource as the Web, categories really break down. They break down even in your home. You have one box for "kitchen stuff", one for "christmas stuff", one for "shoes" and one for "stuff that I didn't know which box to put them in". You don't have millions of anonymous sources of stuff, only what you have yourself brought home, but still you can't categorize it properly.
When Yahoo was started, it's main point was that Altavista didn't work, people just searched on random terms and got random results. What they offered was instead something much better: information sorted into categories, sorted by real, intelligent people instead of a stupid search function. They had a point, of course, and quickly became a popular alternative to the search function of Altavista. As the Web grew, though, they had problems keeping up. How do you decide what categories to carry? And how many people do you need to keep your categories up-to-date when new pages pop up at an ever-increasing rate? An ever-increasing amount, of course, which Yahoo didn't have. As the chaos increased, search engines were becoming more relevant again.
Then something happened. The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to develop a technology that would retrieve appropriate information from the vast amount of data and they combined the two ideas into something even better: information sorted into categories, sorted by something that increased at the same rate as the pages to be sorted. The pages themselves. They harnessed the power of a million real, intelligent people writing links to each other's pages. And the categories are many: they are the search words. Before Google, search engines competed on how many pages they had indexed and how many hits you would get when searching for a certain term. Google beat them all, both on pages indexed and acquired hits, but that was not their strength. Google was immensely more competent on providing relevant hits. They had the ability to reach into that big miscellaneous-box that is the internet and bring back that screwdriver you were looking for. And they could do it cheaper and better than Yahoo. A million of web authors writing links produced more detailed and updated information than a handful of editors on Yahoo's payroll.
What happened to Yahoo? Obviously, they created a search engine. The directory apparently still exists at http://dir.yahoo.com/, and is still being updated by humans. But when you go to yahoo.com, it's not the directory you see, it's the search engine. That's why Google is the most preferred search engine of the world!
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